5 Important Features of Product Photography

Maëva Berthelot dances around an empty London in This Striking Ad for Bose Noise Cancelling headphones. Lost in her own world of music.

Photography has been used by companies across the world for a long time to promote their products and services. The rapid growth of Digital marketplace has made product photography much more relevant than the past. Product photography should be informative, make your products look their absolute best, increase sales, aid professionalism and credibility to your products.

Here are five important features that can take your product photography to the next level:

1. Tell a story

Every day, businesses have the opportunity to tell stories with photographs. Through photographs they can express their unique personalities, encourage interaction, and create a consistent atmosphere that keeps their customers coming back for more.
The best product photography is one that tells a story and makes the audience feel a certain way. Some of the leading businesses in the worlds have mastered the art of storytelling via. their product imaginary.

Fedex have nailed the story telling in this image.

2. Composition

The most beautiful colors and best environments in the world may not lead to a great image if it's not composed well. There are three things that you need to consider in composition:

Placement

Where you place your product within an image will be partially dictated by the environment in which you're placing it, but you'll still want to consider an important photographic rule that forms bedrock of most well composed images: the Rule of Thirds. This rule breaks an image into “thirds" both horizontally (left, right and center) and vertically (top, bottom and center), creating a grid of nine equally sized sections to guide you as to where you should place the important elements of the photo.
For understanding the basics of it, Petapixel takes an even deeper look at how to put it to use in your own photography.

Depth

Take a look at above photo of Gucci perfume.
Notice how the perfume is in focus, but the rest of the photo is either partially or entirely out of focus. Meaning the image has a shallow depth of field. It not only makes the image look nicer; it also helps you focus on the primary subject: that beautifully crafted bottle of Gucci Perfume.

Angle

At the end of the day, the purpose of product photography is to make sales.
There is no real rule for using angles, but it's good to play around with them. Try shooting a product from the side, from down looking up, from up looking down, from closer, from farther away, from any which way, and you may find a great shot that you didn't even realize was there.
It is the composition (placement, depth and angle) that will make your product the hero.

3. Effective utilization of light

light is the most important factor when it comes to photography. In fact, the word photography is actually ‘writing with light’. Remember that a camera simply records the light in a scene. There is no other magic to it. So it’s important that the light in the scene is setup in a desirable manner.
When it comes to setting up your shot, start by figuring out what kind of background and lighting source you need for the product as well as the setting. For example, the way you would set up lights for a deodorant bottle is completely different than the way you would set them up for a mobile phone.

4. Less technical more artistic

If you are shooting conceptual then you need to think artistically. And product photography is less technical than artistic. Create imagery which would blend well with background, lighting, props and overall story of the product. Photographer should understand the background and context in which these photographs will be used and accordingly create a canvas on which such photos can be taken.

5. Minimalist

Minimalism is a very subjective concept in the photography world. The Webster dictionary defines it as follows: A style or technique that is characterized by extreme spareness and simplicity. Many of us are drawn to ‘less is more’ with simple lines, geometric patterns, strong shadows, contrasting colors, lone subjects, etc. Best product photographs should embrace minimalist approach by focusing on what really matters and cut down on unnecessary clutter.

Apple is known for minimalist approach in everything they do. Above is one such example of product photography of their “red” special edition iPhone.

If there’s one thing that’s true when it comes to creating strong branding, it is the perceived value of your products. And the trustworthiness of your business is often judged by the quality of product/ service photographs.
At Sacred Fig Design , Jaipur we have in-house photographers with extensive experience shooting across categories—